Chapter 16 #2
“All right.” But there was something thoughtful in her expression that told him she had filed the answer away.
He thought of the lock on Krebb’s ship opening beneath his fingers and dismissed it. That had been circuitry and experience. Nothing more.
“What’s a Key?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Krebb didn’t either. But apparently Thressk does.”
“Perhaps. I heard whispers about the Grorn when I was chasing rumors. I ignored them.” His mouth hardened. “That may have been a mistake.”
“So Valkesh might have something to do with Aurelians.”
“Maybe.”
“But we don’t know.”
“No.”
“And apparently Thressk has the coordinates, but he hasn’t been there.”
“Not yet.”
They looked at each other. Then he planted a big hand against the deck, and her eyes narrowed.
“No.” He paused, and she glared at him. “You were unconscious for six hours.”
“I need to see what Krebb kept in the ship’s records.”
“You need to stop bleeding.”
“Amy—”
“The settlement on Valkesh has been sitting abandoned for who knows how long. It can manage another few hours without you.”
He stared at her. She stared back.
He could simply stand up. It wasn’t as if she could physically stop him. He settled back against the bulkhead instead.
“Good.” Satisfaction flickered across her face. “You’re learning.”
A growl moved low in his chest, and she smiled. The sound changed into something uncomfortably like a purr before he could stop it, and her smile faltered. For one long moment neither of them said anything. Then she picked up the wet cloth again.
“So what happens when you’re well enough to start being unbearably stubborn again?”
“I find the coordinates, and I go there to see if Valkesh has something to do with my mother’s people.”
“Then we—”
“No.” The refusal came out harder than he intended, and her hand stopped halfway to his temple. “First I take you somewhere safe. Somewhere the Grorn don’t reach and no one calls you a runaway slave. Then I go.”
She tilted her head. “Where are you going to take me?”
He opened his mouth, and found nothing there.
He’d spent twenty years drifting between ports that would sell you to your own hunters for the right price.
He had no world. No family he trusted to protect her and no debt he could call in and no quiet corner of the galaxy where he could set her down and trust it to keep her safe.
He’d said somewhere safe as though such a place were a thing he could reach out and pluck from a shelf, and it wasn’t. She saw the realization cross his face before he could hide it.
“You don’t have anywhere like that, do you?” she asked quietly.
“I’ll find—”
“Where, Brannik? Name it. One place. One name.”
He had nothing. Her lips curved into a small smile, something both gentle and stubborn.
“You don’t have anywhere either. Neither of us does. That’s the truth of it.” She set the cloth down and straightened her shoulders. “So I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Amy.” He leaned towards her. Pain lanced through his ribs, but he ignored it. “You don’t understand what the Grorn are like. If they take you—”
“Then they’ll take me from a ship instead of a kitchen. I’ve been taken before.”
She said it flatly, and it stopped him dead.
“Four years ago someone decided where I went and what I was for and I didn’t get a say in any of it.
I got sold. I got dumped in a port to die, and when I didn’t die, I got to spend four years turning myself into someone I wasn’t so nobody would notice I was alive.
” Her voice shook but she didn’t stop. “For four years, I’ve had other people decide what happens to me.
And now you—the one person who never asked me anything—you want to stow me somewhere out of the way and go off without me. ”
“To keep you—”
“I know why.” She reached out and put her hand flat against his chest, over the worst of the bruising, and he felt it burning through his battered body like a brand.
“I know exactly why, and it’s the best reason anyone’s ever had.
But you don’t get to be the only one who makes the choices.
Not anymore. Not with me.” Her hazel eyes held his, brown and green shifting in the amber light, and there was no fear in them at all.
“You picked me back there. Let me pick you back.”
He looked at her for a long moment. He should argue.
Every protective instinct in him howled at him to argue, to overpower her objections, to be immovable the way his size let him be immovable about everything else.
He could out-stubborn her. He could refuse.
He could set the course himself while she slept and put her down on the first neutral world they passed whether she willed it or not.
And he understood, with a clarity that surprised him, that if he did, he’d lose the only thing he’d ever found that he wanted to keep.
The boy who stopped speaking had done it because everyone he loved had decided, without him, to leave.
If he did the same to her now, he’d be the one leaving someone behind at a window.
“All right,” he said, and she blinked.
“All right?”
“You’re coming with me.”
He watched surprise and triumph war across her uncovered face, and he had to look away from her because if she saw his face, she’d see how fierce and how deep his pleasure ran.
The pleasure that she had chosen him, that she would rather stand beside him in front of the danger of the Grorn than be set down safe and alone.
No one had chosen to stay with him in twenty-five years.
He kept his voice flat and gruff, a warrior conceding a point. “You’ll do as I say if it goes bad.”
“I’ll do as we agree if it goes bad.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up before he could stop it.
“Agreed,” he said.
She sat back, and her hand slid off his chest, and he felt the loss of it. But then she smiled at him, wide and warm and reckless, the first true smile he’d ever had from her, and it hit him harder than any drug they’d put in his blood.
“Good,” she said, and picked up the wet cloth. “Now hold still. I’m not done with you yet.”